Optical fibers provide advantages over conventional communication lines. As compared with traditional wire-based networks, optical-fiber communication networks can transmit significantly more information at significantly higher speeds. Optical fibers, therefore, are being increasingly employed in communication networks. U.S. Pat. No. 5,682,454, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, discloses an exemplary optical-fiber cable.
Optical fibers can be bonded together to form a planar, optical-fiber ribbon, which itself may be divisible into subunits (e.g., a twelve-fiber ribbon that is splittable into six-fiber subunits). Multiple optical-fiber ribbons may be aggregated to form a ribbon stack, which can have various sizes and shapes, such as a rectangular ribbon stack or a trapezoidal ribbon stack in which the uppermost and/or lowermost optical-fiber ribbons have fewer optical fibers than those toward the center of the stack. The ribbon-stack configuration helps to increase the density of optical elements (e.g., ribbonized optical fibers) within a round buffer tube and/or a round optical-fiber cable. Even so, the placement of planar, optical-fiber ribbons as rectangular or trapezoidal ribbon stacks within round tubes is spatially inefficient.
Mass-fusion splicing of optical-fiber ribbons requires a planar ribbon geometry, however, rendering non-planar, optical-fiber ribbons unsuitable for mass-fusion ribbon splicing operations.